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Progress Report by Tong Jun Qun - Week 5
5th September to 11th September During this week’s meeting, we were introduced to four members of the Liquid Interface team. James Teh will be the new research fellow for Liquid Interface. His haptic research expertise will be a valuable asset as we move into wearable, haptic computing for the project.Shuang Yu is a new PhD NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering student over at the Mixed Reality Lab. Joining her are Jian Xiong and Sunny, two electrical engineering interns from Singapore polytechnic who will be helping us out for two months. Jeffrey set about to give us our tasks and responsibilities. I will be responsible for the software aspect of the interface. Specifically, I will be programming the ATMEGA 2560 microcontroller and preparing the two setups in time for the user study. I will also be focusing on the sensing elements of the Liquid Interface system and compare both methods (hall effect centric versus rare-earth centric) of sensing. With the results from the user study, we will be able to come up with some form of interaction with the interface that is appealing to the end user. It is also hoped with the results of the user study, the team will be able to come up with research papers for three conferences namely the ISWC 2012, Pervasive 2012 and DIS 2012. In order to better understand the algorithm the previous batch of FYP students did, Eishun, a student intern who worked with them in the project last year was gracious enough to come over to the lab and explain the code they had written. He was a great help and I now have a better understanding of the C code. I spent the rest of the week replicating the 1st setup. The aim is to fully understand the hardware my predecessor has done. Once that is done, I will be able to realise the new implementations that hall effect centric sensing requires. I have drawn the following pin diagram for my reference. During those few days of debugging and testing, I came across a couple of difficulties. The first of which was the fact that some of the wires to the electromagnet were exposed to the circuit, resulting in short circuits. To address this, I redid some of the insulation and housing. In addition, I also attached a total of six Hall Effect sensors to 3-pins housing so that it will be easier to connect them to the magnet driver boards. Furthermore, some of the magnet driver PCB were faulty. We had to test the connections on the PCB manually and resoldered some of the pins that were not connected properly. After fiddling with the setup, we successfully replicated the 2nd setup with three spare magnet driver circuits to spare. We will start programming the setup next week to realise the rare earth centric sensing interaction. Objective *Continue to study the C code that has been written by the previous team *Programming the 2nd setup to realise hall effect centric sensing *Coming up with a few ways of interaction for the user stud y